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Photo: Warner Bros

The implosion at tea-party megagroup and super-PAC FreedomWorks continues today with a report from David Corn at Mother Jones about the time staffers asked two female interns to act out a bizarre sex scene featuring a panda suit and a Hillary Clinton mask. The promotional clip was planned for a massive conservative conference featuring Glenn Beck, but someone ultimately thought better of showing it. It was completed, though, according to former staffers, and it may have been Stanley Kubrick–inspired:

In one segment of the film, according to a former official who saw it, Brandon is seen waking from a nap at his desk. In what appears to be a dream or a nightmare, he wanders down a hallway and spots a giant panda on its knees with its head in the lap of a seated Hillary Clinton and apparently fellating the then-secretary of state. Two female interns at FreedomWorks were recruited to play the panda and Clinton. One intern wore a Hillary Clinton mask. The other wore a giant panda suit that FreedomWorks had used at protests to denounce progressives as panderers. (See here, here, and here.) Placing the panda in the video, a former FreedomWorks staffer says, was "an inside joke."

The scene sounds oddly reminiscent of The Shining (but with more sexism), in which Shelley Duvall's character, running from her homicidal husband, happens upon a bizarre sexual encounter between a man and someone in a bear suit:

"How was that not some form of sexual harassment?" a former FreedomWorks official said to Corn. "And there were going to be thousands of Christian conservatives at this thing. This was a terrible lack of judgment." They should've stuck with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"I heard they had made an obscene video mocking Hillary Clinton," confirmed former GOP congressman Dick Armey, who left FreedomWorks amid the chaos of an internal investigation, but took $8 million with him. "I was shocked at the ugly and bad taste." The highbrow film reference was, understandably, overshadowed.